Chinese trade

Look at the indirect effects as well.

US consumers are feeling the pain.

It will create a lot of volatility.

New chart from Torsten Slok.

After a trade deal, America will need an industrial policy.

What does a “stable” Chinese currency even mean?

US equity markets price in a 60 per cent chance within a year.

In which we think back on our own year.

The renminbi is not yet a global currency.

Trade-related news has slashed roughly 6 per cent off the S&P 500 this year, says Bank of America.

The country must still grapple with lacklustre credit growth.

Since the trade war, a gutted industry.

The semi-annual report comes out any day now.

China's landmark infrastructure and trade initiative stirs up controversy.

More charts from the People's Republic.

China's currency approaches a key threshold.

CLSA map it out.

It's just not the thing the White House has made it into

US farmers decline a subsidised option, get one anyway

America vs China, round two.

Yet slowly but surely the inflation trend in China is turning.

One of the go-to guys on trade litigation between the US and China is Bill Perry, a Seattle-based attorney who spent the 80s at the US International Trade Commission, the Office of Chief Counsel and Office of Antidumping Investigations, and the US Department of Commerce. While tackling all sorts of anti-dumping and countervailing duty cases, he runs a blog that covers what it says on the tin: US China Trade War And if you ask him about the fast-escalating case involving China’s ZTE Corp, Bill will offer you one word: Hòumén (back door or 后门 in simplified Chinese.

While, sometimes, moments of unique creativity from those trying to get money out of China come out from behind the curtain to take a bow — losing a lawsuit on purpose and ants moving house, for example — the really large flows outwards have remained pretty opaque. Less opaque now though. Both Christopher Balding and Deutsche’s chief China economist Zhiwei Zhang have taken a long hard look at how capital is flying out of China, despite capital controls which shouldn’t be sniffed at… but clearly are to a large extent. tl;dr: It’s the over-reporting imports that we should blame.

For years the Chinese government accumulated claims on the rest of the world, with foreign reserves soaring almost continuously to a peak level of just under $4 trillion in 2014. Then things went into reverse:

By George Magnus, an associate at Oxford University’s China Centre and senior economic adviser to UBS Ok you guessed: we are not talking about Beijing.

Earlier this month at the annual meetings of the American Economic Association in San Francisco, Justin Yifu Lin argued that China’s growth slowdown has been mainly the result of external and cyclical factors rather than structural transformation. His case rests on the idea that other East Asian and emerging-market economies had also decelerated in recent years, some of which — Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan — do not have the same structural problems that are thought to plague China’s economy. Furthermore, Brazil’s decline has been much sharper than China’s, while India in 2012 also slowed dramatically before rebounding; China can rebound too.

We don’t think of China as an oil producer. And yet, it very much is. China’s oil production in 2014 amounted to about 4.2 mbpd in 2014, according to BP statistics — equal to that of Canada’s production at 4.2 mbpd in 2014 and nearly double that of Nigeria’s at 2.4 mbpd. Then, of course, there’s the mark-to-market value of China’s strategic petroleum reserve, which the country has been building up for years. We don’t know the actual size of the SPR because the numbers are not public, but oil experts say it stands close to 100m barrels, with a sizeable portion of the reserve built up during the $80-$100 per barrel price era.

By Peter Doyle, former IMF official and economist. The line of China Bulls is that “things really aren’t that bad or surprising, and there’s considerable willpower and ammunition left in Beijing should it be necessary”.